On August 31st, I extolled Clybourne Park (now playing at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre), Bruce Norris’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about white flight in 1959 ...

In youth I once drove across a vast expanse of central Mexico in my convertible. I paused in many villages to meander through modest churches, eat with locals, and play games with ...

My best friend in high school and I communicated almost entirely in catchphrases from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and SCTV. While not a comedy nerd like me—if Mel Brooks was ...

I am a man of the right, so much so that for me the Nazis were simply brownshirted cousins of the enemy in Moscow. In American terms, my political sympathies tend to rest with ...

My friend Daniel J. Flynn is publishing a book called Blue Collar Intellectuals. One chapter I’ve seen in proofs, “The People’s Professor,” got me to thinking about a ...

The bullfight is the ballet of death. It has been immortalized in verse, paint, and film, elegized sometimes to great effect and sometimes to great lament. I have witnessed the ...

The sad, mopey bald eagle that is the American republic is perched an unlucky 13 months away from the 2012 presidential elections, and the Republican candidates aren’t exactly ...

When my son was ten, his baseball coach—inspired by Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game—came up with a statistically brilliant team ...

A few hours after reading an interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I watched them both on 60 Minutes. They’re all over the news ...

I own a pair of Sarah Palin shoes. Not the “do-me” pumps fetishized by her friends and foes alike. Mine are customized Keds with her face all over them. On the rare occasions ...

It’s been 20 years since Nirvana’s Nevermind album and its breakthrough single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” were released. The scrawny corpse of Kurt Cobain, the Man Who ...

The American political class is becoming better and better-looking. The trend began back in the heady days of 2008, when that mulatto presidential candidate from Illinois was ...

Here is a secret well-known among attorneys: By the time a criminal is convicted, he has usually committed at least three other serious crimes. Here is a secret well-known among ...

Whatever happened to the femme fatale? From Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity to Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Linda Fiorentino in The ...

KID OR CAREER? Dear Delphi, I am 36 and am having my first baby, due in December. I am thrilled out of my mind—I have always wanted children—I can’t wait! The problem is, my ...

Late one Saturday morning in 1990 under the skeleton-bleaching California sun, I motored through a crumbled, hilly, ashen section of East LA looking to see if any of the Hicks ...